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Hamilton Heights: Awaiting a Bounce

Top left, some of Hamilton Heights’ brownstone stock is seen on 147th Street between Riverside Drive and Broadway. Top right, City College is a local landmark. Bottom left, residents court sunburn in a community garden in Riverbank State Park. Bottom right, the new Columbia University is materializing just west of Broadway and above 126th street.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

CALL it the Columbia effect.

The university is breaking ground on a satellite campus in Manhattanville, the once-industrial area north of 125th Street on the Far West Side, giving Hamilton Heights, the neighborhood next door, an extended turn in the limelight.

As the wrecking ball claims more and more of Manhattanville’s motley collection of warehouses and garages, Hamilton Heights, largely unknown to those who have never cracked the 100s on the No. 1 train, is preparing for an influx of teachers, students and support workers. It is also anticipating the higher real estate prices that usually come with proximity to an Ivy League institution.

“The average person who lives downtown doesn’t know about us,” said Christa Giesecke, an architect who has lived in the Heights for 11 years. “But that’s about to change.” She moved from the West Village in part because of the many handsome row houses, some with wide Romanesque arches over doors and windows, and fanciful terra-cotta details like serpents eating their tails.

Ms. Giesecke is the chairwoman of the land use committee of Community Board 9. (The board rejected the expansion plan in 2007; the more recent agreement includes provisions for community involvement.)

“Once Columbia establishes a presence here,” she said, “more people will know about us.”

The Heights stretches from the Hudson River to Edgecombe Avenue, from West 133rd Street to West 155th. It was named for Alexander Hamilton, whose clapboard-sided country house, Hamilton Grange, was recently moved a short distance to a prominent berth in St. Nicholas Park. The neighborhood’s other claim to fame is the presence of City College and its more than 15,000 students, most of them commuters.

City College’s neo-Gothic quadrangle was recently joined by the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, Rafael Viñoly’s renovation of a late ’50s building. A science research center on the southern end of campus is nearly done.

In addition to four subway stops, the neighborhood’s amenities include two substantial parks. One is St. Nicholas Park, slightly overgrown, with stairs that zigzag through steep outcroppings. The other, Riverbank State Park, is across the Henry Hudson Parkway, and reachable by two footbridges. It takes a kitchen-sink approach to recreation, with a track, a secluded community garden, and a new restaurant with a patio on which to enjoy a beer while taking in views of the Hudson.

The high ground, relatively low density and low-slung housing stock, coupled with angled streets that break up the grid, often give the area a sunnier, airier feel than other parts of Manhattan.

The 80,000 residents live in a mix of five- and six-story tenements, many rent-stabilized; brownstones along Convent Avenue in the Sugar Hill area in the northeast corner and the West 140s near Riverside Drive; and a scattering of midrise co-ops. What is missing is new construction — the exception being a six-story midblock condo on West 135th Street, near Broadway, that was completed in 2002.

But condos exist as conversions, like the eight-unit Bradhurst Carriage House lofts, on West 146th. There are also condos in a string of 11 prewar buildings on Riverside Drive, starting at West 143rd Street. These were converted starting in 2006 by the Pinnacle Group, which in the process became embroiled in disputes with rent-regulated tenants over evictions.

Last week, according to Streeteasy.com, 94 homes were for sale in Hamilton Heights. At the low end was an income-restricted four-bedroom co-op for $139,000. At the high end was a three-family town house with a mansard roof, marketed as a one-family, in Sugar Hill, for $3.2 million.

“You can get the square footage that you can’t get downtown along with the finishes, at the same time,” said Ikahn El, a broker with Keller Williams, adding that Hamilton Heights town houses routinely sell for less than half the price of comparable buildings in the West Village or Chelsea.

Mr. El sees housing developers following close behind the opening of the new campus. He said he had been talking to a “hotelier who will remain nameless” about buying the site of an old theater at Amsterdam Avenue and 149th Street to build a condo.

“He said, ‘How much do you think you can sell condos for up here?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ve sold condos for $1 million,’ ” Mr. El said.

Nancy Cabrera, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman, says her own experience living near a Columbia property convinces her that prices will rise.

In the 1980s she lived on West 103rd Street in a one-bedroom co-op that she sold for $335,000 in 2002. Then, she said, Columbia built off-campus housing on her corner — and in 2005 an identical apartment then sold for $500,000, which strikes Ms. Cabrera as a steep jump even in a hot housing market. She is now listing a four-bedroom 1901 town house at 470 West 148th Street for $975,000.

When the new Columbia campus is finished in 2050, Manhattanville will have a striking new look. Glass towers housing the business school, labs and classrooms will replace workaday brick structures, meatpacking warehouses and even a Studebaker plant. Sidewalks will be broadened and planted with trees. The $7 billion project — designed by the architectural heavyweights Renzo Piano; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; and Diller Scofidio & Renfro — will create 6,000 permanent jobs, the university says.

The first phase, including the business school and a science center designed by Mr. Piano, is to be completed by 2015. Columbia has promised to put stores on the ground levels of some of the buildings.

Residents of Hamilton Heights look forward to those stores, especially those who moved to the area in recent years and were used to far greater shopping options downtown. Even franchises are few: The closest Starbucks is at West 145th Street and Bradhurst Avenue, just outside the neighborhood. The produce selection at the groceries can be limited. “There are a lot of mangoes,” Ms. Giesecke said, “but not a lot of berries.”

Many hope the university’s arrival inspires entrepreneurs to open more restaurants along Broadway, the area’s main retail strip.

Some early efforts failed. A trio of side-by-side restaurants on Broadway around 137th Street, Tres Pasos Mexican Kitchen, Vinegar Hill Bread Market and Café Largo, opened in 2007 but are now sitting dark.

There has been more success recently, say residents, who point to two popular new Italian restaurants from the same owner: Trufa, at West 139th Street, with a striped awning and exposed brick walls, opened in April; and Tonalli Cafe Bar, at West 149th, in 2009.

Gabriela Serrano, an assistant manager at Tonalli, said the business had originally operated a Mexican restaurant in the Trufa space. “The neighborhood is changing, so we wanted to, too,” Ms. Serrano said.

Laurie Lock moved to Hamilton Heights in 2005 after hopscotching northward on the Upper West Side — first to West 79th, then West 96th, then West 105th, and finally West 149th, where she owns a three-bedroom condo in a four-unit brownstone, with multiple decks. She said she paid less than $1 million for the place.

Ms. Lock, who works for a not-for-profit organization, started a kind of welcome wagon, a parents group to help organize holiday parties. Membership is now at 170 families.

She bemoans the lack of a good stationery store or clothing boutique, despite a critical mass of people who seem to desire such shops.

If any kind of new stores “were to open here right now,” she said, “and they were good, they would be booming.” She added that Columbia could be the spark that finally lit the fire for retail. “I think it is a positive development,” she said.

Tom Smith, a professional clown who has lived in a three-bedroom co-op on Riverside Drive in Hamilton Heights for seven years, is torn about the new campus. He said he did not like the institution’s use of eminent domain to get its hands on some key parcels. “I’m not really an eminent-domain kind of guy,” he said.

Yet he thinks Columbia will help curb street crime, which in turn may make the area a more pleasant place to walk. “There will be a lot less chicanery and hustling going around,” he said.

Of course, one person’s cool new cafe is another’s sign that the neighborhood is about to be ruined by gentrification. And there is no shortage of people in Hamilton Heights who fear Columbia’s arrival. Many renters live in income-restricted or rent-regulated housing and would be pinched by higher prices for goods and services.

Others, like Alicia Barksdale, who has spent her entire life at 3333 Broadway, a hulking 1,200-unit rental complex that practically sits atop the new campus, are more concerned about the short-term problems, like construction noise and dust.

In April, residents of the building, where Ms. Barksdale is president of a tenants group, demanded that their landlord, Urban American, install air-conditioners in all the windows to filter the dust, she said. Urban American did not return a call for comment.

There are also concerns that tenants will be pushed out once landlords realize they can make more from students, professors and staff members. But others say rent stabilization will make many residents difficult to dislodge.

“I’m all for making a better community,” Ms. Barksdale said. “But it has to be a better community in terms of affordable housing and jobs, and education for children and seniors.”

Robin Prescod, a broker with Harlem Homes Real Estate, says the new campus may concentrate students in Manhattanville, rather than disperse them throughout Hamilton Heights, where many live now.

The students might think, “If I can live on campus for $800, why would I pay $1,400 for a one-bedroom?” she said.

Mr. Smith, who grew up in the area, recalled gazing down on Manhattanville during jogs across the Riverside Drive viaduct, which spans it.

“You knew something was going to happen,” he said. “You just knew sooner or later it would be developed.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2011, on page RE1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hamilton Heights: Awaiting A Bounce. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe